In the last newsletter, we discussed EIP
(Enterprise Information Portal) as a customizable interface across disparate data sources
for knowledge workers. We attributed this new acronym to an InfoWorld article. Actually, the phrase came from a Merrill Lynch
report by Chris Shilakes and Julie Tylman
dated November 16. Some statements from this report are:
- EIP will provide users a single gateway to personalized
information needed to make informed business decisions [page 1]
- EIP is a browser-based system providing ubiquitous access to
business related information in the same way that Internet content portals are the gateway
to the wealth of content on the Web [page 3]
- The EIP market was a US$4.4B market in 1998, growing to a
$14.8B market by 2002.
- The EIP market could exceed the Enterprise Resource
Planning (ERP) market.
These predictions are impressive, too impressive in fact!
Further reading revealed that the authors predicted that EIP will “emerge from a
consolidation within and between” these areas:
- Content Management: Organizing unstructured
data into a meaningful collection...that an organization can search, manipulate, analyze,
and share. Documentum, PC Docs...
- Data Warehouses: Staging area for corporate
data, optimized to support information access. Informix, IBM, Oracle, NCR, Microsoft,
Sybase
- Data Marts: Staging area...storing a subset
of enterprise data.
- Extract, Transform and Load (ETL):
Carleton, PRISM
- Data Quality and Cleansing: Data audit,
name/address integrity, and data re-engineering. Carleton, PRISM, Vality
- Warehouse Administration: Schedules jobs
and manages metadata. Platinum...
- Query and Reporting: access...databases
servers and view results in report format. Business Objects, Brio Technology, Cognos, IBM,
Information Advantage, Oracle...
- Online Analytical Processing (OLAP):
Analyze data within a multidimenional view. Gentia, Hyperion, Information Advantage,
MicroStrategy, Oracle, Pilot, Seagate
- Data Mining: Discover meaningful
relatoinships, patterns, and trends from data. Angoss, Cognos, HNIC Software, IBM, Silicon
Graphics
- Enterprise Reportng: Consolidate disparate
reporting tools into a central library. Actuate, Seagate
- Analytical Applications: Access and
analysis within a targeted business context, either horizontal (budgeting) or vertical
(insurance). Hyperion Solutions, Oracle.
My opinion is that their market definition for EIP is too
broad and not clearly partitioned. EIP will be an important
emerging market; however, it will be dependent upon the above markets, rather than
subsuming them. EIP will become the delivery mechanism for data warehousing and similar
systems, using publish-and-subscribe, UI customization, usage tracking, preference
profiling, and collaborative sharing. Larger vendors who offer broader system solutions
will acquire vendors specializing in EIP. In particular, I predict that the major data
warehousing vendors (such as IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft) will dominate the EIP market by
integrating EIP functions within their offerings.
My second concern with the ML report is their lack of
treatment for external data. It is mentioned several times, but without
elaboration. The only specific quote was: “the Internet has flooded corporations with
information at an astonishing pace and from a dizzying array of sources. Yet cross
enterprise access to this information has been difficult if not impossible to
accomplish” [page 4]. For EIP to be successful, its architecture must embrace
web-based information resources in a meaningful fashion. Simple pass-through of web
content is not sufficient. As advocated by web farming, the integration of external data
with internal sources and with the data warehouse is required.
Other publications have joined the EIP bandwagon. An
InformationWeek article
refers to EIP as the corporate or business portal. The Red Herring assessment of EIP
reported on Viador's latest round of financing. Another InformationWeek article reported that Sun
Microsystems introduced Internet portal sites based on its NetDynamics application server,
letting users combine E-mail, directory, and other services into an integrated Web
interface.
At last count, here are the vendors who
specialize in EIP:
- Richard Hackathorn |
